terça-feira, 28 de outubro de 2008

Working PC Inside A Classic Game Boy

A few weeks ago we wrote about the smallest PC motherboards yet. In his post, James wondered what sort of cool new case mods this would inspire. Here, my friends, is the answer. You are looking at an entire functional PC shoehorned into 1989's classic Game Boy.

Let's see, what are the down sides? There's no screen on the unit itself, so you have to connect a monitor. The unit is also no longer able to provide the classic pea-green Tetris many of us grew up on. Nor is it any more likely to fit into a pocket than the original massive portable game unit. On the positive side - it's a freakin' PC inside a GAME BOY!

The OS runs off of a 4 meg flash drive that sockets into the original cartridge port (of course...), and the buttons on the front face have been replaced with LED indicators. They've even managed to include USB ports!

If they added a nice screen to the project (with a custom icon set that would reproduce the smeary greenish LCD of the original Game Boy), it would be just about perfect. I wonder what the current draw is of such a unit - could it be run off of a pocket-sized battery pack for a decent amount of time? If so, you'd be talking the ultimate in portable computing and portable cool.

One quick question about casemodders. How come no one has told these guys about needle files to clean up their rough Dremel work? Maybe they don't have time to mess around - that's probably why these PC hot rod guys always have several awesome PC projects going, and I have exactly none.[via Plastic Bamboo]